Classic & Vintage Cars
Bugatti, anyone?
Dr. Harold Carr, an orthopedic surgeon in Gosforth, near Newcastle, died aged 89 in 2007. He never married, leaving behind neither wife nor children. But he did have nieces and nephews, and a dusty golden oldie in his garage.
The barn find in question is a two-seater 1937 Bugatti 57S Atalante, one of the rarest cars in the world. Dr Carr's specimen was in almost pristine condition, having spent most of its life untaxed and in the garage.
The Bugatti clocked up a mere 26,284 miles - less than 400 miles per year. And most years, it clocked up no miles at all. For 50 of its 70 years, the car sat motionless in the garage.
Aficionados of old cars knew that Dr Carr owned this automotive rarity, and periodically one or another of them would ask him if it was for sale. His relatives, too, knew that he collected cars but did not appreciate their considerable value.
So who gets the motor? His nieces and nephews inherited it and said that they would sell it at auction.
UPDATE The car was sold at auction in France in early February 2009 for 3.4 million euros (c. £3m).
David Niven, The Moon’s a Balloon (1971)
"In the spring of that fateful year, my grandmother died. For years she had lived in rooms in Bournemouth and as children, my sister Grizel and I had paid her annual visits, travelling from the Isle of Wight on a paddle steamer as day trippers. I remember her as a very beautiful old lady with a cloud of carefully coiffed white hair and a little lace choker at her throat that she kept high under the chin with bones. She had very pale and strangely lifeless skin on her cheeks which I always try to avoid kissing. She left me £200 in her will.
I immediately invested about half of this windfall in a second-hand Morris Cowley and gleefully entered the London social scene.
…I flogged the Morris Cowley, borrowed a little money from the bank and a little more from Grizel who had become a very clever sculptress and was now installed in a tiny house in Chelsea, and ten days before Christmas, I embarked on the one-class liner S. S. Georgic and throbbed my way to New York. Throbbed was the word; I had the cheapest berth in the ship - directly above the propellers."
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